All the time” …we chant back “God is good” it comes again… and we reply again ….cheering for team Jesus
We’ve lost three good people here this week, not elderly “had a good innings” people but people who had been full of life, who’d had plans and dreams still to fulfil and I have wept this at the heart-wrenching pictures of starving little Yemeni babies…..and yet if I’m asked “who do you say I am?” The answer still comes back as Love. I still say you are love God.
Thing is… God is good, God is love, Smile Jesus loves you, have so often just becomes stickers on a guitar case or the words printed on the side of rainbow pencil that we have stopped questioning what it means. It’s the favoured phrase when something goes our way, works out in the end and we high five that we are on the winning side.
If I say God is good, I think that deserves some time spent on it, I think it honours God when I come to him with tear stained cheeks and ask “I know you are good…so then why?” ….and friends I know the answer, I know the theories, the fall, the sins. But sometimes our floundering hearts need to hear it from our Father, just one more time like a comforting bed time story that you know ends with happy ever after.
Love doesn’t always look like a valentines heart, it’s not always in the shape of a hug, sometimes it comes as unwelcome guidance, as discipline from a parents heartfelt desire for the child to be free. Sometimes it comes as a closing door that we begged would be open…and at times it looks like suffering, even on a cross.
For those times, when we look up and say please, please save us from any more suffering that is what he does. He stops the suffering and brings us home. There are days when I say, enough, that’s enough you have to come now Jesus and rescue your children….but He whispers just a few more, let’s just gather a few more, can we wait for a few more to come ? And the struggle seems suddenly very small.
Love isn’t what we want but what we need, Always for our good and His glory.
If we could just begin to love like that.
If we could just learn to receive love like that.
Well then we too will hold the keys to heaven.
